


Do not stand at my grave and weep

by asparagus_writes



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka Tano Needs a Hug, Anakin Skywalker Doesn't Turn to the Dark Side, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode: s07e12 Victory and Death, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Let them have their emotional catharsis PLEASE, Master & Padawan Relationship(s), Order 66 (Star Wars), This is me still being salty about the lack of Anakin and Ahsoka hugging in season seven
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-21
Updated: 2020-12-21
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28221657
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asparagus_writes/pseuds/asparagus_writes
Summary: After Ahsoka has escaped Order 66, she receives a visit from an old friend, who has not.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Ahsoka Tano
Comments: 19
Kudos: 177





	Do not stand at my grave and weep

**Author's Note:**

> _Do not stand at my grave and weep_  
>  _I am not there. I do not sleep._  
> ...  
>  _Do not stand at my grave and cry_  
>  _I am not there. I did not die._
> 
> -excerpts from a poem by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Ahsoka woke to the feeling of an unfamiliar hand on her forehead.

It wasn’t _exactly_ unfamiliar—she was certain she’d felt the intent behind the touch before, though perhaps not the specific weight, the precise placement of calluses on the skin, its dry warmth. The touch was a hello, or maybe a goodbye. It was a benediction; it felt safe. There was protection in it.

Only this fact kept her from springing an attack on the person who had managed to sneak up on her in her sleep.

She simply opened her eyes instead, without moving a single other muscle in her body.

She saw Anakin leaning over her.

He couldn’t be here.

She hadn’t heard from him, even though her commlink had somehow survived the day, and even though she had tried to contact him. There was no way for him to know where she was. _She_ didn’t even know where she was, on a planet she couldn’t give a name to, except by calling it after the graveyard it now contained.

And he was different. His eyes held a sadness—not the despairing sadness, not the frustrated kind that she had seen before—it was a weary sadness, but hopeful too. Bittersweet, but Anakin was never bittersweet. His emotions were always dichotomous: peaks of joy and pride, hollows of anger and pain. But never both.

He wasn’t real—he couldn’t be. She must have been dreaming. He didn’t look real either: halfway between a hologram image and a true physical presence. He was lit up a steady blue, not the flickering orange of the fire she and Rex had started for the night. And he wasn’t quite solid—she could just make out the dark outlines of the lone Y-wing they had used to survive by looking _through_ his body.

He wasn’t real—he couldn’t be. But as Anakin withdrew his hand upon seeing her awake, its absence immediately left an ache inside her, and Ahsoka realized that she didn’t _care_ what was real.

(Anakin couldn’t be real, or at least he couldn’t be here now. But he had touched her, and it had felt as real as anything.)

Ahsoka just laid there and stared at him, afraid that doing anything else would shatter the illusion and pull her out of her dream. Then, Anakin would be gone, but that horrible, cloying ache would remain.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said softly.

“You didn’t,” she whispered back.

His lips twisted, making the bittersweetness slightly more bitter, but nothing else happened to take him from her and she was grateful.

“You don’t believe I’m real either, do you?”

“You can’t be,” she protested, her throat tightening painfully with tears. She wanted nothing more for her master to be here—for him to hold her and tell her that everything would be okay.

“Through the Force, all things are possible,” he recited.

“You choose now to start telling me to believe in empty Jedi platitudes?”

“I suppose you’re right,” Anakin conceded, sitting down next to her on the ground, like it was the most normal, mundane thing in the galaxy. He was wearing different robes, she noticed. The outer cloak was the same worn brown as his usual one, but the tunics underneath were long and cream-colored. He wore no utility belt, and she didn’t see his lightsaber.

“If the Force could do _anything_ , then I would have used it to make lot of things different.”

“Like what?” Ahsoka asked, sitting up next to him, wanting to lose herself in pretending for just a moment.

Anakin sighed.

“The men back there would have been free to make a different choice. You and I would be back on Coruscant, celebrating the end of the war with them. They would be alive. A lot of Jedi would still be alive.” He hesitated. “I would be alive, to meet my—”

Hot tears rolled down her cheeks, and she couldn’t hold back the wounded sound she made. She would have hoped her dreaming mind might be less cruel than to remind her that her master was most likely dead.

She didn’t want to look at him. She wanted to wake up, to an existence where she could at least pretend—

“Oh, little one,” he breathed. At the moniker, fresh tears spilled over, escaping from the deep, endless lake of grief that she thought would live inside her forever. “I thought you would have realized that already.”

She had, though she had desperately wanted it not to be true. Neither she nor Rex had the heart to voice the thought aloud. But as she pulled the bodies of men who wore helmets painted with her face from the rubble, Ahsoka had kept imagining the next one would be his.

“ _Take it back, please. Tell me you’re lying,”_ she begged him, feeling like a child again.

“I can’t,” he said, “but there are some things that the Force _can_ do.”

She looked, uncomprehending, at the strange image of him, the blur of her tears making him seem even more insubstantial. But Ahsoka could see him well enough to make out the faint smile he showed her.

“I’m going to give you another Jedi platitude,” he warned her, with a touch of humor in his voice: “’Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.”

For emphasis, Anakin reached out his hand and poked lightly at her shoulder through the fabric of her dark cloak. She could feel it, just like she had when he had smoothed his hand over her forehead.

His _hand,_ his _right hand_.

She blinked more tears out of her vision, not caring how they fled down her face, to see it more clearly.

He was wearing no glove, there was no metal, no wires—just skin. Why would she imagine him like this? She had never seen what Anakin’s right hand had looked like, but somehow she knew in her bones that the image was correct down to the last detail. Without thinking, she reached out and grabbed it, and then was surprised when she found that she could.

Ahsoka turned his palm over in her hands, awed, and he rotated his wrist to let her. He had a small scar, she realized, in the webbing between his thumb and forefinger. It was the same dark color as the one on his face, standing out against the rest of his skin. She pushed back his sleeve to find a flesh-and-blood forearm, leading all the way to his elbow and seamlessly into the part of his bicep that she _had_ seen before.

Anakin hummed thoughtfully as she traced her finger along the meandering line of one of his veins, from his wrist towards the crease of his elbow.

“You know, Master Yoda told me that after I lost this arm on Geonosis. My body, the version of me that doesn’t have it anymore, is in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant,” he explained. “But nothing happened to the part of me that is the Force, and I can do what I like with it. I can manifest anywhere in the galaxy, looking however I want to look, to anyone who is willing and able to look for me.”

“So you’re _not_ dead,” she clarified.

“Only from a certain point of view,” Anakin replied, something in his voice suggesting it was a joke that she couldn’t understand. He took her hand in his left and guided her fingers to press against the inside of his right wrist. There was no pulse there.

Tears welled in her eyes again. Nothing made _sense_ anymore. If this was a dream, which she _really_ wasn’t sure of, it was simultaneously the most realistic and ludicrous one she’d ever had.

“You’re—” she stammered, “I don’t—”

“I’m one with the Force, Snips,” he said, still frustratingly gentle. He was more placid—more of a _Jedi_ —than she had ever known him to be, and she decided that she hated it a little bit. “I just managed to stay more _myself_ than most other beings do.”

Ahsoka leaned into her master’s shoulder. Buried the side of her face in the fabric of his cloak.

“Because you’re the Chosen One,” she guessed, sniffling.

“Yes,” he said simply. In another time he would have brushed it off—or disagreed. She and Anakin had never talked about it by themselves, but other Jedi would make references to the prophecy sometimes. Ahsoka’s agemates had certainly quizzed her about it often enough. But then she had left them behind. They were probably dead now. And the only one she could discuss it with now was him.

“Is the Force balanced?”

Anakin scoffed.

“Not yet. I think that might be why I got to stick around. I’ve got some unfinished business. There are some people that need me.”

I _need you_ , she thought. But what she said was,

“The Force needs you.”

“Yeah,” he whispered into the top of her head. She couldn’t feel his breath. “I’m just…not sure yet what will happen to me when I’ve finally...fulfilled my destiny.”

 _No_ , Ahsoka thought when she realized what he was implying, _I’ve just gotten him back. It_ can’t _take him away again._

“Don’t go,” she said desperately, fighting back more tears, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now. How do I—What do you want me to—I need you to tell me what to _do_.”

He had a prophecy—a destiny—but she had _nothing_. She could never belong anywhere for long, it seemed.

“Ahsoka.”

She looked at her master and he looked back, with meaning in his eyes.

“You taught me something very important once, do you remember?”

She shrugged feebly. Where was he going with this?

“You had been missing, the Trandoshans had kidnapped you, and I wanted to apologize to you, for not doing enough to keep you safe.”

Ahsoka remembered. She remembered how good it had felt to see him smile down at her. How warm it had felt in the Force when he’d put his hands on her shoulders—the sun coming out after a very long night.

He looked away from her briefly then, and she could see when he met her gaze again, even in his odd ghostly glow, the way his eyes glistened.

“You said that I’d already done everything I could. That I taught you how to survive.”

She could only nod.

“So _live_. Please. _That’s_ what I want you to do. The rest is up to you.”

“ _Anakin_ —” she sobbed. It was so simple, and yet it seemed like the most difficult thing in the galaxy.

“Shh,” he soothed her, cupping her cheeks with his two warm human hands, “I know. I _know_. It’s already been so hard, and I am so, _so_ proud of you for coming this far.”

Ahsoka just wept louder—grief for what she had lost, and joy for what it seemed she had not. Rex stirred where he lay sleeping on the hard, dirty ground on other side of the fire.

Anakin looked in his direction and smiled sadly. Rex didn’t have the Force. When he woke, he wouldn’t be able to see Anakin.

Anakin turned back and pressed a featherlight kiss to her forehead. Ahsoka thanked the Force that she could feel it.

“You’ll see me again,” he murmured, “May the Force be with you.”

And when Rex opened his eyes and pushed himself sleepily onto one elbow to ask her what was wrong—why she was crying—Anakin was gone.

**Author's Note:**

> me: *listens to "Ahsoka Lives" from the new Mandalorian soundtrack*  
> me: ...  
> me, crying: oh my god, I have to go write something about her _right now_
> 
> The appearance of a certain Jedi and the parallels to Shmi and Anakin's TPM farewell in the Mandalorian finale did not help me contain my feels either.


End file.
